Freedom 251 Controversies Emerge

This week, the $4 Freedom 251 smartphone launched, but the phone has run into a number of issues since then.

The extremely affordable Freedom 251, which gets its name from its price of 251 rupee, is being manufactured by little-known Indian start-up Ringing Bells. The smartphone looks strikingly like an iPhone, runs Android 5.1, and features impressive specs for its miniscule price including a 4 inch display, 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, 3.2 megapixel rear camera, 0.3 megapixel front camera, and 1,450 mAh battery. The smartphone was unveiled on Wednesday with the tagline "dreams will come true" and the company started taking orders on Thursday. Ringing Bells has promised to deliver the phones by the end of June, following the completion of its manufacturing plants.

Following the launch, Ringing Bells was met with skepticism and people started asking questions about the $4 smartphone. The Freedom 251 went on sale Thursday morning but soon after, the website crashed. "Dear friends, we are very grateful for your enormous response and your kind patronage and would submit that as of now we received approx. 6 Lacs hits per second as a result of your kind, overwhelming response, servers are over loaded," said Ringing Bells in a statement on the crash. The company said that it is "taking a pause" to upgrade its servers and will be back up and running sometime on Friday. Other criticisms on the Freedom 251 include that it is too cheap to make any profit and that the so-called beta version of the phone copies Apple's iOS icons and resembles Adcom's Ikon 4.